Three Sisters (The Tattooist of Auschwitz #3)(21)

For three days Cibi goes to work with no news of Livi. But at least she’s in hospital, not sweating and suffering on a bed made of straw, all alone. Cibi loses herself in her new job and looks forward to the regular breaks this heavy work entails. Their only meal is lunch, when the cart will turn up with five cauldrons of soup and five servers. Cibi has heard the crazy stories of what goes into these ‘soups’, and then sees it with her own eyes: a toothbrush, a wooden bangle, rubber bands, floating amidst the onions and sardines. The detail shares a rare laugh the day a girl pulls a comb from her bowl of soup and loudly announces: ‘I have a comb, if only I had some hair.’

On the third day of Livi’s confinement, Cibi climbs down from the roof and studies the mass of girls waiting to be called forward for their soup. She has noticed something strange about this lunchtime routine: most of the girls are looking in the direction of the plump server with the two long brown braids. Her hair alone is odd as, to Cibi, she looks like she’s at least seventy years old. Cibi makes her way off the roof and joins the girls waiting for their food. Now she too looks at this braided cook. When Cibi catches her eye, she smiles. The cook does not return the smile – God knows no one has once smiled since they arrived here – but she does beckon Cibi forward. The ladle is dipped deep into the pot, spooning not only thin, tasteless liquid into Cibi’s bowl, but a big chunk of meat too. The woman gives Cibi a nod and casts her eyes back over the hungry girls to see who next she will favour with her largess.

Cibi sits alone and gulps down her soup, until the chunk of meat is revealed at the bottom of her bowl. Looking around to make sure no one is watching, she picks it up with her fingers, licking it dry before stuffing it into her pocket, beside Livi’s small knife. She will find a way to go to the hospital on her return and share it with her sister.

But when Cibi enters the block later that evening, she finds Livi waiting for her inside. Livi is almost better and some of the colour has returned to her cheeks. Cibi puts a finger to her lips and reaches into her pocket. She opens her hand to reveal the piece of meat. Livi’s eyes go wide. With the knife she cuts the meat into thin slivers. It is a feast of unknown origins, but the girls don’t care.

*

Over the next three months the number of prisoners increases dramatically. They arrive by train in their hundreds, filling all the buildings in Auschwitz, and replacing those who have died, either from illness or at the hands of the SS. Cibi and Livi hear rumours of a killing room, a bunker below ground a few streets away where men, women and children enter alive, and are carried out dead. The girls have seen male prisoners pulling carts loaded with bodies. It’s too awful for Cibi to process, so she decides instead to believe they died from disease.

Livi’s hand heals as the sisters grow weaker. Like everyone, they now take each day as it comes, feeling a glimmer of satisfaction when they close their eyes at night: they have survived another day of demolition detail. More than once they have seen what happens if an SS guard is feeling particularly vindictive; a chipped brick, a toppled pile – and a bullet fired. They have had to help carry dead girls back to Auschwitz, at the end of a long hard, harrowing day.

But the knife continues to puncture their misery with moments of joy. Cibi uses it to cut their bread into small portions: some to be consumed immediately, the rest to be saved, giving the ability to ration their food. It’s not much, but it gives the sisters a secret and with it a tiny amount of control over their chaotic lives. Livi keeps it with her at all times: concealed in her breeches by day, under her mattress at night.

Boys from Slovakia started arriving a few weeks after Cibi and Livi, but they didn’t stay in Auschwitz. The sisters knew where they were, however. The bricks the girls continue to drop off at the field are being used to construct new housing blocks, and across the road from this site vast wooden rooms have been erected. It is within these structures that the Slovakian men are now housed; it is obvious to all that a new camp is being built.

Cibi can communicate with the Russian prisoners of war because she is familiar with Rusyn, the Ukrainian dialect spoken in eastern Slovakia. But the whispered conversations she shares with the men reveal nothing new about their situation. Livi, still the shy, innocent teenager, never joins in these exchanges. Cibi is glad: this place hasn’t taken everything away from her little sister.

And then one day, the men have some answers for Cibi. These new brick buildings are to be women’s housing. A women-only camp.

Birkenau.





CHAPTER 10

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Summer 1942

B

y June, the sisters are navigating their days in silence. The grinding exhaustion of manual labour and scarcity of food has worn them down. Cibi notes the arrival of summer with a weary acceptance that they might remain in this place, this terrible place, for years – or until they die, as so many others have. Every night she wonders how they have survived another day. Even the idea of her family begins to feel like a half-remembered dream she had a long time ago. Cibi tries to imagine what Magda is doing, whether she is safe, whether the Hlinka guards are still looking for her. She keeps a watchful eye on Livi, who is getting thinner by the day, often mute, often moving from place to place in a dazed trance. But Livi also works hard; she is brave, well-liked by the other prisoners, and Cibi is proud of her.

There is no let-up in their treatment: despite the raging heat, the daily abuse of their bodies and minds continues, but as August approaches, the promise of cooler days beckons. Cibi and Livi have endured illness, injury, starvation and ‘selection’.